The reason elite roles are elite is because they're focused on directing the activities of other people. Management consultants, executives, finance, entrepren

The reason elite roles are elite is because they're focused on directing the activities of other people. Management consultants, executives, finance, entrepreneurs, politicians, to some extent tech - what these all have in common is that they make decisions influencing what problems all the other people in society will solve. By definition, there can only be a limited number of these roles in any complex society, because the roles are structured as the top of a pyramid. If you don't have a large number of people following you, you're not really an elite. The true purpose of the Ivy League isn't necessarily to train elites to do better at these roles. Everybody sucks at these roles, regardless of how much training you've had. Executives make boneheaded company-destroying and job-destroying decisions all the time, finance people make bad investments, politicians make bad laws. This is because the complexity of understanding and directing thousands to millions of people is more than any one person could conceivably do, regardless of how much training they've had. In fact, one of the reasons liberal democracies have generally done better than communism or fascism or feudalism is because they try to devolve as many of these decisions as possible to non-human systems like markets, elections, and algorithms. But having some selection filter for the people who will occupy these roles, whether it's the Ivy League or imperial China's civil service exam, seems to result in less braindead decisions than having absolutely no filter. More importantly, the Ivy League also functions as a way to take potential counter-elites and assimilate them into the existing system so that they can take roles that preserve it rather than destroy it. The most dangerous thing for a socioeconomic system is a leader who can convince a majority of people that the existing system needs to be cast down and replaced with a competing one. Ivy League universities work like an escape valve, trying to identify people that may be poor but smart and give them the connections and education (indoctrination?) to believe that they can make themselves less poor within the existing system without having to destroy it.